I think modern seminaries take women and men who have a passion for the gospel of Jesus and, through academic instruction in teaching and preaching, destroy their ability to convey that passion to their congregations. In fact, recent research suggests that the more higher education a pastor possesses, the less vitality there is in the congregation!
That doesn’t necessarily mean highly educated clergy destroy congregational vitality; but there is a correlation. Perhaps there is a tendency of less-enthusiastic congregations to hire less-enthusiastic clergy. And since higher education dulls clergy expression, those congregations could lean toward hiring more highly-educated clergy.
The problem is that mainline seminary-trained clergy are taught to sublimate their passion for the “things of Christ,” which is what drew them into the ministry in the first place. Taught by secular Ph.D.-level faculty who, themselves, were taught to make systematic, coherent, logical presentations of a point, seminary students are instructed in the same style of presentation. That’s great if you’re writing an academic paper, or delivering a definitive lecture to your peers. It is inadequate for the pulpit.
Clergy are called to preach, not to lecture. Lecturing informs the brain; preaching moves the heart. Clergy who are “best” at their jobs are clergy who are best able to articulate the passion of Christ for His people, and to move Christ’s people to both be better persons themselves, and to dig in to the messiness of life in order to be a servant to others.
What’s missing in most contemporary mainline preaching is a connection from the heart, to the heart. Good preaching requires both heart and mind involvement. Seminaries do a poor job of honoring and developing the ability of clergy to express their love for Christ in passionate, heart-to-heart language. Consequently, mainline churches – fed a steady diet of passionless intellectual expositions of the Bible – lose their passion to live out God’s Word and Commission.
In this essay, Bible teacher, preaching trainer, and Fellow at the London School of Theology, Peter Mead, beautifully articulates the difficulties in finding and expressing the right balance between the intellectual and the emotional, in order to achieve a full-bodied and balanced tone in preaching.
Preaching and Heart-Level Hermeneutics (Article)
“Peter Mead looks at why weak preaching prompts profound questioning of our hermeneutics, and offers some solid advice for the development of preaching that gives much of God and genuine confidence in Christ. …”
For more on this, I recommend reading Gerhard Forder’s Theology Is for Proclamation.
Forder places preaching within its larger, proper context, proclamation. He says (academically-oriented) clergy need to distinguish between systematic theology and proclamation:
Indeed, a major difficulty in usual discussions of the matter is that systematic theology and proclamation tend so easily to be confused. When that happens it is invariably proclamation that is obscured. Proclamation gets displaced by explanation, teaching, lecturing, persuasion, ethical exhortation, or public display of emotion about Jesus.
Proclamation, as Forder means the term, involves preaching but is not limited to preaching. It encompasses the liturgy and sacraments, as well as the everyday conversation of Christians.
Proclamation is primary discourse: the direct declaration of the Word from God. Systematic theology is secondary discourse: words about God that reflect the primary discourse (the Word from God). When secondary discourse replaces or covers over primary discourse, the gospel is no longer preached; a human construct has replaced it.
I believe that is what too often happens in churches pastored by highly-educated clergy. Forder’s book can help academically-oriented preachers untangle the two levels of discourse and recover a capacity to proclaim the Word from God, informed by words about God, without conflating the two.
